16 innovations

Air Cork keeps your wine fresh

The Air Cork consists of an inflatable latex bladder, attached by a hose to a squeezable hand pump. To use it, you lower the bladder into the bottle until it touches the surface of the wine, then pump it up until it seals against the insides of the bottle. When you do want to finish off the bottle, you deflate the bladder via a release valve on the pump, then pull it out and rinse it off.

The device’s big reported advantage over a cork is the fact that the wine remains completely sealed against the bladder, not coming into contact with air trapped inside the bottle. While vacuum stoppers work by removing that air, the makers of the Air Cork claim that some of the wine’s aromatics also get pumped out in the air-removal process.